“He was a scary character to play,” Goode told Parade.com during a junket for the limited series. “But he does have a lot of charisma and there’s all these myths and fables about what he got up to during the ‘70s. But he also had such brilliant taste, and he was a bit of a maverick.” Evans may have been the head of Paramount, but he still had to answer to Charles Bludhorn (Burn Gorman), who was the CEO of Gulf+Western, which owned Paramount. And Bludhorn was not a man who suffered fools gladly, so he wasn’t always happy with Evans’ antics. “We see him at probably the most stressful part of his career,” Goode continued. “Obviously, he has paymasters and people who are trying to pull his strings over at Gulf+Western. He had just a wonderful arc throughout. The Godfather is just a small segment of what he managed to do.” But it wasn’t just the opportunity to play a character as flamboyant as Evans that piqued Goode’s interest. It was also the opportunity to be associated in some way with The Godfather itself, even if at a distance. “I actually went, ‘I can’t wait to watch this, even if I’m not allowed to be involved in it,’” Goode said. “Which generally shows the level [of my interest]. It’s so well written and it’s so interesting. I didn’t know half of the secrets about how difficult it was to make the film.” The story of the making of The Godfather is told from the point of view of its sole producer Al Ruddy (Miles Teller), who won the Oscar for Best Picture, and goes into details about the many near-firings, the union issues, the run-ins with the mob families in New York, and the heated casting disputes. For Goode, the most surprising thing he learned from The Offer was after filming had begun in New York and seemed to be going well, two men—who will remain unnamed so as not to spoil—who had Bludhorn’s ear did their utmost to sabotage the production. “There’s a mutiny between two of the people who are trying to get an actor thrown off and the director [Francis Ford Coppola played by Dan Fogler] thrown off, so that they can take over because they don’t think it’s going well. The mutiny, I thought, was extraordinary.” Keep reading to find out at what point Goode knew he had Evans down, how much input Ruddy had into the limited series, and what role Goode could see himself playing in The Godfather. Was there a specific scene in all 10 episodes that made you say, “OK, this is where I really found the character. This is who Bob Evans really is”? Good question. Well, it took until episode four until I realized I had him. There are so many little moments. For me, really, I think when I come in in episode one, in fairness, it’s just the way he’s able to handle people. I think we had that fairly straight on. But there’s a scene later where someone just knocks into me in the toilets as we’re having a little discussion. And I just turn around and go, “Shake it somewhere else, sweetheart.” That felt very Bob. Did the glasses help? There were so many! Yes, exactly. You do all your work on the voice and everything else, and you put the suit on, and then finally when I got the glasses, I was like, “Wow, OK! They’re like a layer of protection.” Al Ruddy is still alive. How much input did he have into this? Oh, he had a lot. Obviously, we were shooting during COVID and he’s 90, so there was an element of I’m sure he was keeping himself to himself. But during pre-production, he was very much with [executive producer] Dexter Fletcher and Miles a lot. He didn’t come to set, but we would hear messages back and forth saying whether he was happy or not. And luckily, he seemed to be fairly content. Did he talk to you at all because this is his take, not Bob Evans’? Well, as Bob Evans once said, there’s always three versions of any event of anything in life. There’s your version, there’s my version, and then there’s the truth. So, this is very much Al’s version. But pretty much everything has been fact checked to within an inch of its life. Obviously, it’s a dramatization, it’s not a documentary. Al wanted to be a film producer because he thought it was so much more important than TV. But this is a 10-hour TV series that is about the making of this world-renown film. What do you think TV can do today that maybe it didn’t do back then? I think if you think about it, it’s amazing that TV’s taken such a long time to catch up to Brideshead Revisited, when that was made. Because that took the idea of taking a book and re-doing it in an episodic format, which seems to emulate how books are, they can unfurl at the same time. Brideshead was made in the ‘80s. It’s taken nearly 40 years to catch up. But you can tell a longer story; you can grab someone’s attention. You don’t have to truncate narratives so much. And I think, and not just because of COVID, but we’re watching media in a completely different way now. And we will dissect and disseminate it however we wish, be it on a phone or whatever. So, we have a lot more access to be able to watch, it’s all around us. And I like TV that takes its time to unfurl that story. It’s also the craftsmanship that’s going into television now. It used to be just that you have certain shots and it was only in the movies. And now you’re getting that same level of craftsmanship, and actually sometimes more money being put into television than into film. So, they’re complementary really, but it’s meant that television has gotten 10 times better. If you were going to be cast in The Godfather, what character do you think Coppola would have seen you as? Who do you think you could have played? [He jokes] I might have been a waiter in the scene when Michael kills Sollozzo. Or the barman at the back shaking a cocktail. The Offer is currently streaming on Paramount+. Next, Meet the Man Who Plays TV’s Sexiest Vampire—A Discovery of Witches’ Matthew Good
